At events I often get asked, “Gregory, what’s the big subject or latest thing for OpenStreetMap this year?“. I tried to cover this when I spoke at GeoData 2017 last Thursday, although perhaps I tried to cover too many other subjects. So here’s my answer in blog form, your mileage/answers may vary.

Information board at SotM 2017

Continuing to affect lives – I put this here to cover a range of topics that I struggle to keep hold off. You’ve got thousands of people doing humanitarian mapping, with also deprived and mis/under-represented communities creating maps and using them to improve their situation. HOT, WheelMap, and others continue to do brilliant work.

Staff Mappers – often called “paid mappers” this is currently a heated and controversial topic. But it’s something that needs and should be thought about. OpenStreetMap is amazing because while companies like Mapbox and Facebook could legally take a copy of the database and then tidy it up, it’s actually set-up to encourage them to contribute their improvements directly to the same database we use. These companies have and are dedicated resources to have whole “OSM departments”, so it would be silly to scare them away with nasty attitudes.

Studying diversity and focus – academic research of OpenStreetMap has moved on from simply trying to measure completeness and accuracy. Now a number of studies have been done, or are in progress, as to what diversity there is in the voluntary project and what are they interested in mapping? It could be a moving target, as new groups of mappers form and demographics change in relation to where/how those groups start.

OSMF and OSM UK sign the local chapter agreement

The season of the Local Chapters has begun – this is the big thing and something that might have been foreseen or desired by people as early as 2006 when the OpenStreetMap Foundation was founded. Now there are a few local chapters, including for the UK, and it’s really exciting where this will lead. Local chapters are a great way to say you support OpenStreetMap in your region and you want to see it’s benefits promoted to others. Of course check out what their specific aims are, but they’re all talking to each other through the OSMF “Advisory Board” and in-person meetings like the local chapters congress at SotM 2017. I really think this is a brilliant level of organisation, and of course it will be amazing to watch stuff happen from it but it also needs people to get involved and help out. People like you?

Promote and facilitate the use of OpenStreetMap data by individuals and organisations in the United Kingdom.

In 2007 the OpenStreetMap Foundation(OSMF) was incorporated as a UK company, to support the international OpenStreetMap project and run the services (hardware, website, etc) needed to do that. When individual countries setup their own organisations, and the concept of OSMF local chapters start to become formalised, the question has existed… should there be an organisation specifically for the UK, and what would one look like?

Around Summer 2015, Rob proposed the question again… “Do we want our own chapter/organisation?”. There was a strong answer for yes, and to look closer at what it would be. After a lot of hard work and dedication, a non-profit company “OpenStreetMap United Kingdom CIC” was incorporated in December 2016. At the end of February we had an AGM to elect our 5 board members, of which I’m one. The organisation’s Articles of Association state the 4 aims, but this could still lead to unlimited possibilities on what actions are to achieve it. An in-person meeting was held in Birmingham, open to all (members and non-members alike).

Improve and increase the size, skills, toolsets and cohesion of the OpenStreetMap community in the United Kingdom.

On the train to Birmingham, I drew out pictorial representations of the aims. From the 4 aims, we recursively answered why it is an aim (or not happened). There was a lot of activity of this before the meeting. Only 10 people managed to make it to Birmingham, so I tried to keep remote people connected by tweeting #osmuk updates and commenting on the Loomio discussion forum. It got a few retweets/likes, but I don’t know if people appreciated this or they weren’t interested in hearing live updates. We briefly paused to order pizza, deciding it was so productive and enjoyable we didn’t need a break. After pushing out more whys, we found that these were leading to clear points for actions and

Promote and facilitate the release by organisations in the United Kingdom of data that is suitable for use in OpenStreetMap.

a lot of short-term and long-term ways we could achieve our aims, at least in part.

We took the 27 actions points (33 before merging duplicates), and cast votes on them. We were a small group, but it was great to see the desired priority from those that had gone through the 5-hours discussion. I’d encourage others in the UK OSM community to share your thoughts in the Loomio thread. We’ll take some rest to dwell on those priorities, hopefully we can have people step forward to take the lead on helping them happen.

Increase the quality and quantity of data about the UK in OpenStreetMap.

It’s an exciting start. It’s not all about the board, and you really shouldn’t look to them to do the work. Are you interested? Do you want to follow what’s happening, and maybe help out? Please join the OSM UK mailing list, and even consider becoming a member.

It might be unusual for OpenStreetMap and this book, but Muki Haklay is a name in the project that has been focused on GIS when I was only learning to talk. Thankfully he’s not held back from doing non-standard courses, and that’s probably as good for the really cool CASA department in UCL (where he’s a professor) as it is for OpenStreetMap. Professor Haklay knows the academic scene, and I think it’s really valuable to have that side on the OpenStreetMap interest. So I’ve tried to follow Muki’s and CASA’s work alot because it really looks fun and new what comes from them. There’s always been a little bit of me wandering why Muki doesn’t get in involved more with the OSM community and this book newly revealed to me why that was. He’s taken a deliberate stance to not get deeply involved, for great reasons that only make me respect him more and be more interested in anything he blogs about or publishes. There’s so much of intrigue into the project by reading the interview with Muki, that I’m struggling to sum up the topics here. Oh, and it was one of the few chapters I jumped to before reading the book start to finish, it didn’t let me down.

Groningen in 2007 and 2017, from mvexel.github.io

At a similar time to me, Henk Hoff got involved in the project, and his city was similarly just a passing motorway as far as OpenStreetMap was concerend. This is a conversation about the early days. The small communities, limited tools and imagery sources, how a country’s community grew, and the conflict with map companies who’s turf we stepped on. Henk talks a lot about his move into the foundation and the OSM core community slowly growing to include folk outside of the UK. It’s maybe right for him to talk in long swashes about OSMF and the State of the Map conferences, because Henk has been involved in them both for so many years, but it does make it difficult as a gentle read. Behind the scenes organisation of SotM conferences you have attended is why you might read this chapter.

Pavel Machalek is someone who heard about Steve’s OSM but initially missed the boat (as many did) and returned to the scene next when they heard OSM was a big thing. It’s one of the short interviews, so no further comment.

Everything is cool would sum up Mikel Maron’s chapter and you might need a specialist glossary as many of the terms he uses go unexplained. He goes deeper into the subject of trying to teach mapping and to bring maps to places/people that haven’t had any maps before. After that valuabe side of OpenStreetMap, this chapter goes into the topic of “Steve Coast, the great leader” including when Mikel and Steve weren’t talking for a year.

How a large organisation (AOL’s Mapquest) supports OSM is the main conversation with Randy Meech. There’s a common question of how you can get money out of open data and open source, Randy attempts to tackle that subject. He also briefly touches the subject of imports and whether their good or bad, but maybe that needs to be done in live conversations to be of value. I noted that one of the questions isn’t formated in bold, but thankfully I’m not listing all the times that the subediting cut corners/budget.

Ed Parsons – another of the chapters I first read, I should read it again with this blog post in mind.

Andy Robinson covers so much in his chat with Steve, lets jump in. How the core tags/schema came to be, a must read/know for mappers! He gives a positive view of the OSM volunteer force, and doesn’t neglect the politics of OSM which then moves into Steve Coast and why he upsets people (oh yeah, it gets personal to the interviewer and editor). Andy has been such a valued part of the project despite living out of the major cities like London. He talks about the emotional benefit of visiting places for the puropse of OpenStreetMap. Also we should cover the reasons for setting up the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF), and it couldn’t be any less right for Andy to talk about that.

A photo of the OSM servers (in 2008), as taken by Grant

If there’s only one “technical” chapter you’ll read, make it Grant Slater’s. Technical decisions, and ideological decisions affecting the technical position, but all talked about at a level for those that aren’t programmers or system admins. He explains that volunteer time is far more costly than hardware costs. The best question of the book is “What’s been the most fun thing to do”, I’ll leave Grant’s answer in the book. Chatter shifts from technical to the license change and it’s painful memories, along with very specialist software that was written for a rare one-time use. He even talks about the different characters that have fascinated him. Thank you Grant for being so friendly in-person and in this interview, the last two pages make a brilliant end to the book.

Now the cheesy wrap-up bit. Something about how the history of OpenStreetMap is only just beginning would be apt. The majority of people interviewed in this book are people that Steve knew when he was still roaming London with a laptop in his backpack as a GPS logger. There’s plenty of people that Steve Coast doesn’t know that should be interviewed, and people joining OpenStreetMap now could well become the import people in the project’s history. My big points would be to the regular blog interviews like “Mapper of the Month” posts people do and the OpenStreetMap awards that are newly running this year. I’m really excited to be hearing about or meeting the award-winning community members in five-years-time. Thanks to the 16 people who chatted with Steve, thanks to Steve for preparing the book, and when will someone be compiling volume 2?…

There was a lot of effort put into organising The State of the Map(SotM) conference, and it was a success. I was one of two Code of Conduct volunteers (for want of a better title). Some would point out I have related experience helping people in conflict, however this kind of role at a conference was very new to me. As part of our SotM work, we are writing documentation/guides to help future events run more smoothly. I want to write notes on what I did for my role, then I thought it would be good to share these publicly and allow feedback. There were no major cases to deal with, so this is not the most comprehensive post in the world to explain the issues and troubles of enforcing a Code of Conduct(CoC).